A Historical Intervention in the “Opportunity Warsâ€: Forgotten Scholarship, the Discovery/Creation Disruption, and Moving Forward by Looking Backward

Stratos Ramoglou and William B. Gartner

Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 2023, vol. 47, issue 4, 1521-1538

Abstract: There are two battles at the heart of the “opportunity wars†: (1) Are opportunities discovered or created, and (2) Should we perhaps abandon the opportunity concept altogether? We argue that the first question is a pseudo-question, made possible by the loose use of “opportunity†in the discovery/creation debate during the last two decades. However, we refrain from going so far as to conclude that the opportunity concept should be abandoned altogether, since we observe that strategy and entrepreneurship scholarship prior to the 2000s made a more meaningful use of the concept. It alluded to the environmental conditions necessary for the actualization of desirable futures and hardly ever questioned the agent-independence of such conditions. Accordingly, we maintain that the opportunity concept should simply exit the blind alley created by the “discovery/creation†distraction and help reorient attention toward the agent-independent sources of opportunity and threat —beyond unrealistically optimistic views of entrepreneurship as an act of “opportunity discovery†and/or “opportunity creation.â€

Keywords: opportunities; threats; entrepreneurial metatheory; strategic management; history; agency/structure; possibilism; positive thinking ideology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10422587211069310 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:entthe:v:47:y:2023:i:4:p:1521-1538

DOI: 10.1177/10422587211069310

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().